By Sola Adebawo
Few stories capture the contradiction of African integration more vividly than Aliko Dangote’s frustration with travelling across the continent.
Africa’s richest man has built businesses across national borders and invested billions of dollars in African economies. Yet he has repeatedly lamented that his Nigerian passport requires him to obtain visas for about 35 African countries.
Think about the irony.
If one of Africa’s most consequential investors still encounters Africa through the bureaucracy of being a foreigner, what chance does the young Nigerian entrepreneur seeking a market in Nairobi have? Or the Ghanaian engineer pursuing an opportunity in Johannesburg?
We speak confidently about African integration. We have built the African Continental Free Trade Area around the ambition of a single continental market.
We celebrate regional value chains and the freer movement of goods, services and capital.
Yet Africa remains deeply suspicious of the African who crosses a border.
The numbers tell their own story.
By June 2026, 49 African countries had deposited instruments of ratification for AfCFTA. The African Union’s Protocol on the Free Movement of Persons, adopted in 2018, had secured only four ratifications. Fifteen are required for it to enter into force.
Forty-nine versus four.
Africa’s governments appear far more comfortable integrating markets than integrating mobility.
That contradiction has become tragically visible again in South Africa.
In parts of Johannesburg, anti-migrant protesters have reportedly gone door to door, forcing suspected foreigners from their homes and handing some to police. In one reported case, a Zimbabwean man said he was legally resident. Thousands of African migrants have left amid growing fears. President Cyril Ramaphosa has himself warned against scapegoating migrants and citizens assuming the powers of immigration authorities.
This is no longer merely a debate about border control. It is the dangerous transfer of immigration authority from the state to the street.
But South Africa did not invent the African fear of the foreign African.
History should make the rest of the continent more humble.
In 1969, Ghana issued its Aliens Compliance Order, requiring foreigners without valid residence permits to leave.
The International Organization for Migration estimates that about half a million people, mostly from other West African countries, were affected.
Fourteen years later, Nigeria confronted a different moment but reached for a disturbingly familiar instrument.
In January 1983, as the optimism of the oil boom gave way to economic crisis, President Shehu Shagari’s government ordered undocumented migrants to leave.
Estimates differ, but hundreds of thousands of Ghanaians were among those forced out. Another mass expulsion followed in 1985.
The phrase “Ghana Must Go”, now casually attached to a chequered travel bag, carries a darker historical memory. It recalls an era when fellow West Africans hurriedly packed their lives and left Nigeria.
The pattern did not end there.
In Côte d’Ivoire, the politics of Ivoirité helped turn questions of nationality, land and citizenship into instruments of exclusion. People long woven into the country’s economic and social life became vulnerable as the definition of who truly belonged narrowed.
In Zambia in 2016, rumours linking foreigners to ritual killings preceded attacks and the looting of migrant-owned businesses.
In Tunisia in 2023, Black sub-Saharan Africans faced assaults, evictions and arbitrary arrests after political rhetoric hardened dramatically against migrants.
These episodes are not identical.
Ghana’s 1969 action and Nigeria’s 1983 expulsion were state-directed measures, officially framed around immigration status. South Africa’s current crisis has seen citizens assume enforcement powers.
Tunisia’s recent experience involved anti-Black violence following inflammatory political rhetoric.
The mechanisms differ.
The human consequences, sadly, often rhyme.
There is the hurried packing of a life built over years. Businesses abandoned or lost. Jobs disappearing overnight. Families separated. Savings depleted. Long journeys home under fear and uncertainty. And, in the darkest cases, humiliation, injury and death.
Migration debates are conducted in the language of states, but displacement is experienced in the language of loss.
For the migrant forced to flee, the legal vocabulary explaining his departure may offer little comfort. Whether the pressure comes through an official order, a politically manufactured idea of who belongs, or an angry crowd at the door, the migrant may experience a common rupture: the sudden discovery that the country in which he built a life never fully believed he belonged.
This is not an argument against immigration enforcement.
States have both the right and responsibility to manage their borders.
Undocumented migration creates real governance challenges. Citizens are entitled to demand that governments know who enters their countries and enforce the law.
No serious Pan-Africanism can require South Africans, Nigerians, Ghanaians or any other people to pretend that undocumented migration, organised crime or pressure on public institutions do not exist.
But when a state fails to manage migration credibly, it creates the dangerous political space in which citizens may begin to believe they must do the state’s work themselves.
When formal institutions lose credibility, informal actors rarely wait for permission to occupy the vacuum.
And once citizens begin deciding who looks foreign, breaking down doors or determining guilt by nationality, immigration enforcement has already collapsed into something more dangerous.
The legitimacy of migration control ends where collective blame begins.
South Africa’s present crisis demonstrates how quickly that boundary can disappear.
Official unemployment stood at 32.7 per cent in the first quarter of 2026. Youth unemployment among those aged 15 to 34 was 45.8 per cent. In such an environment, anxiety about jobs, crime and public services cannot simply be dismissed as bigotry.
But anxiety is not evidence, and economic pain does not legitimise collective guilt.
There is also an inconvenient economic contradiction.
United Nations data estimates that South Africa hosted about 2.6 million international migrants in 2024, roughly five per cent of its population. Current estimates of their precise economic contribution are limited. However, a 2018 OECD-ILO study, drawing on earlier economic modelling, estimated immigrants’ contribution at about nine per cent of GDP and found no significant negative impact on native-born employment.
Migrant labour remains important across construction, agriculture, retail and transport.
The people blamed for economic failure may simultaneously be helping to sustain parts of the economy from which they are being pushed.
Still, economics alone cannot explain xenophobia.
Poverty does not automatically produce hatred. Anti-migrant politics can attract people who are neither poor nor unemployed. Economic distress may create fertile soil, but political rhetoric, contested ideas of citizenship and institutional failure determine what grows in it.
Perhaps that is the harder African history we have been reluctant to confront.
We condemn xenophobia most loudly when our own citizens are its victims. We are often less reflective when history reminds us that our countries have also expelled, excluded and scapegoated other Africans.
Ghana’s present concern for its citizens abroad should also invite reflection on 1969.
Nigeria’s outrage should coexist with memory of 1983.
And South Africa cannot invoke legitimate concerns about undocumented migration while citizens assume the powers of immigration officers, police and courts.
According to the 2025 Africa Visa Openness Report, only 28.2 per cent of country-to-country travel scenarios in Africa are visa-free for African citizens. In more than half, a visa must still be obtained before travel.
Markets want mobility. States fear it.
None of this makes Africa uniquely hostile to migrants. Anti-migrant politics has hardened across Europe, the United States and elsewhere. What makes Africa’s contradiction distinctive is that it is unfolding alongside an explicit political project of continental integration.
And perhaps our crisis of belonging runs even deeper.
Some Africans do not need to cross an international border to become foreigners.
In Nigeria, a citizen may live in a state for decades, pay taxes, raise children and build a business, yet remain socially and sometimes institutionally described as a “non-indigene”.
Our crisis of belonging is almost fractal.
At the continental level, the foreign African is suspect. Within nations, the settler remains an outsider. Within communities, ethnicity can still determine who is considered to belong.
We keep drawing smaller circles around citizenship and then wonder why the larger African circle remains fragile.
This is why Africa’s integration project cannot be built through tariff schedules alone.
Traders move. Engineers move. Entrepreneurs move. Technicians move. Capital frequently moves with people.
Africa is integrating its markets faster than it is building the institutions, political confidence and social consent required to govern African mobility.
The answer is not the abolition of borders. Undocumented migration is not Pan-Africanism.
Africa needs stronger migration institutions, credible identity systems, enforceable laws and serious cross-border cooperation on crime and labour mobility.
Xenophobia often occupies the space between legitimate public anxiety and inadequate state capacity.
The answer to weak borders is stronger institutions, not weaker humanity.
AfCFTA may eventually teach African goods to cross borders more freely. The unfinished work is building the institutions, economic confidence and political imagination that allow Africans to cross those same borders without automatically becoming threats.
Africa will not truly become one market until, at some deeper level, Africans stop becoming foreigners to one another.
Sola Adebawo is an energy industry executive and strategic advisor with nearly three decades of experience across Africa’s oil and gas sector. He is the Chief Executive Officer of Hyphen Partners Limited, a specialist advisory firm focused on policy and regulatory intelligence, market entry, stakeholder strategy, and executive positioning in complex and highly regulated industries. His writing explores reform, political economy, leadership, the relationship between institutions and public life as well as the institutional forces shaping Africa’s development. He is an author, scholar and ordained minister.
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